I’m halfway through the first session of this semester, which means another major assignment. Twelve pages, to be exact, on the nature of interactive and strategic marketing. Since I live this stuff at work, I figured it’d be easy enough. And, to a degree, it was… it’s the correlation with scholarly sources and combing said sources for appropriate quotes to drive your paper forward that takes time. Which I underestimated.

😛

At least it’s turned in now. And I finished the first draft of my novelette yesterday, too. I’m not entirely happy with the ending, so I’m looking for feedback from my crit partners. Somehow my variation on Alice in Wonderland ended up taking a detour into straight scifi at the end, and I think the two themes need better integration. I am pleased, though, that despite being in the middle of another class, I managed to finish some fiction.

On the other hand, it’s been a cold, rainy week, so I only managed 2 walks, of almost 4 miles. Kyra has made us pay for the fact that we haven’t given her the exercise she demands by getting us up every 2 hours to let her out.

It all adds up to accumulating exhaustion, so I’m more than grateful for the extension of my weekend into a day off for Memorial day.

The best new thing of the week: An email from my husband linking me to 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was Your Age. (Even though that title REALLY needs pluperfect–a subject I’ve been contemplating blogging about for some time.) Each of the items enumerated is useful to review, but the one that hit me between the eyes was “Discipline is the mother of all virtues.” So I’m glad I’m committed to the ROW80 check-ins to ensure that each of the small milestones along the way contributes to another of the biggies listed there: “A positive vision makes a big difference.” If I’m to make writing stories of various kinds my full-time occupation, I need to remember to take (and enjoy!) all the intermediate steps, and not bemoan the time it takes between now and then. And not bemoan the fact that I have adult responsibilities that insert intervening experiences between each of those milestones.

😉

Here’s crossing my fingers that even with full-time work and pending teeth of doom, I’ll be able to release Wytchfire in the next couple weeks, meeting my stretch goal for this round of ROW80. Check out how the other participants are doing, meeting their goals.

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5 Responses to “Mid-Term, Again”

Yeah, I don’t think one realizes beforehand how much work it takes and how many steps are involved from story idea to publication. It does require discipline. Stick with it. You’re doing well! Have a lovely week.

You have the reason for the ROW80 check-ins there down in one–it gives us a chance to celebrate the smaller in-between steps (as well as recover quicker from the small failures). It’s easy to get disheartened when a project (like most writing projects) takes a long time; we see so many “produces a book a year” examples touted as the desired industry standard… It helps to remind ourselves that those people had years of slow projects and failures before they achieved that industry standard.

*smiles* Yes, it does feel wrong without the pluperfect. I think people avoid it because of grammar checkers. I know that Word had frequently red-lined my writing when I used pluperfect structures (at least until I disabled the grammar checking).

I hope your week goes well and that you remember to give yourself more time for the cross-checking and quoting next paper you need to write.

🙂
My teeth are actually fine for the moment–I’ll be more unhappy when I go in for fillings on the 7th and 21st. My husband’s are even FINALLY settling down, too–no more popping Vicodin like candy, and the antibiotics are reducing the inflammation in his gums so he can chew properly again.

I’m glad to see I’ve found another grammar geek. I hate that most auto-checkers read pluperfect as passive, when that extra “had” can explain SO much about a story’s timeline. I had to quit a book in the first chapter in the past few months because the author was trying to explain the past of the past without pluperfect… and completely lost me. 😛

As for the “book a year”… I was trained as a journalist, so I’m used to FAST writing and short deadlines–and I’m indie and listen to folks like Dean Wesley Smith, who suggest the best marketing is the next book release. So I’m counting on multiple releases in a year (even if they’re not all novels) to avoid fizzling and the hazard of hard-won readers forgetting me in the meantime. It is all self-inflicted stress, for sure, but I started the writing path before the MBA, and vastly prefer the former to the latter, so don’t want to lose momentum either.

Nice to hear that things are settling for (both) you and your husband dentally. The Vicodin experience is one I never wish to repeat again.

I wish I could say I’m a grammar geek. I actually went to college for Forestry and Biology… nearly all my writing skills are self-taught (I was a perpetual As in sciences, Ds in language arts student) because my best friend picked on me for writing so badly. So in my mid-twenties, I hit every style manual, grammar tome, grade school text book even I could find.

And here I am…

DWS does have a point. However I suspect a strong fan base will support an author who produces book on any consistent schedule. I know I’ve waited (with mild impatience) for books by one of my favorite authors because she only publishes one every three years (and these books are part of a series).

Communication and a reader/writer agreement of sorts (even if it’s never stated as one) matter more than playing to a market trend.

But you do what works for you, and it sounds as if this will work because you motivations are focused that way.